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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Technically correct, but misses the point. It's the stuff of: "If you haven't thrown out your cellphone because of its links to capitalist abuse, you deserve to suffer" or something. The Nib was making fun of this years ago, with its comic about "we should improve society somewhat", "yet you participate in society, curious". Expecting individuals to voluntarily find their way to the right decisions or else they deserve to suffer has more in common with liberalism than marxism-leninism. Treating individuals as moral failures (and therefore deserving of suffering) because they haven't rejected every aspect of the society they live in, in order to fight against it, is asinine.
This isn't to take it to another extreme and be in support of having no standards at all for how people behave or who we choose to organize with (a context where this matters a lot more). It's normal to have lines drawn in the sand. But over being on Twitter? For god's sake, they're an internet poster, not a war criminal, and you aren't the same as a Nazi simply by posting on a platform that got taken over by one. That's why I made the comparison to living in the US. It's one of the most grotesque empires in human history, but that doesn't mean everyone who lives there is guilty by proxy with full awareness, complicity, and consent to its crimes. Guilt by proxy is the kind of stuff people use to (flimsily) justify genocide, not the kind of reasoning we need to be getting anywhere near. A person who lives with an abusive spouse is not the same as the abusive spouse. We need to be focused more on solutions than on ivory tower moralizing that conveniently leaves out the ways our own behaviors and associations are linked to the global system of exploitation.
Getting rid of your cellphone is also harder than leaving Xitter. Xitter isn't a vital part of society or really that important, it's literally just a place to waste time. It's actually a really easy and simple thing to do and should be encouraged.
I don't know if scolding individuals for their behavior is effective as a general strategy, I just mean to point out that it's categorically different to criticize someone for using Xitter than to criticize them for owning a cell phone or living in the US.
Twitter, whether we like it or not, is one of the most broadly used social media platforms there is, with some of the furthest reach. Calling it "just a place to waste time" is an ignorant take on it that misses how these platforms become part of communication, career, alerts, friendships, agitprop. For some people, it is "just a place to waste time." For some, it is much more.
It is technically correct that there are degrees of how "easy" these examples of things are to "quit", but as I said before, litigating over which is generally easier to "quit" is missing the point. It's also something that can be greatly influenced by background/circumstances. The US is easy to leave if you're wealthy, but the experience is going to be very different if you're poor. In fact, most things are easy to selectively "quit" if you're wealthy. It's the poor people who have to look worse for not uprooting parts of their life on a whim, while well-off people are more easily able to make choices that look conscientious on paper due to the padding they have.
We could make a chart that tries to go over easiest to hardest things to quit/leave, but it would be misleading if it didn't take into account the reasons any given person hasn't done it and the weight the given thing carries in their life. It would also be rather pointless in this context if we weren't also going over value of quitting. Performative morality isn't going to help the cause and we can't assume that leaving a thing to the fascists is automatically good because fascists are currently in charge of it. That reasoning taken to its conclusion leads to giving up. There are contexts boycotts may make a difference, if they're organized, but I don't see how people randomly choosing to not do a thing when they get around to it is going to apply consistent pressure with vocal demands.
Yeah, call me ignorant, I don't get it at all. I don't see how it's even slightly useful. It's certainly not working class people that "need" Xitter for their career, at most it's petite bourgeois content creators and influencers who need it to reach an audience. I can't imagine what a poor person could possibly need Xitter for, it makes no sense to me. I lack any context to even imagine it.
For context I'm in my 30s and never had an account. It just seemed like a place to make me mad, and that hasn't changed.
For at least a few years Twitter was the place to get breaking news as it was unfolding, like during the Arab Spring. Over the past year though it has become utter shit for even that as X's algorithms push clearly right-wing slants of mostly made up culture war stories.
All that to say though that under a post about the UK government working with Zionists to beat up and jail a shitposter just because they don't like Israel, we're instead in a lengthy discussion about whether or not using the 6th most popular website on the entire internet is a mark against someone. Yes practically anyone on X can switch to another site and be better for it, yes it is incredibly easy to drop for practically everyone using that website... but this started with a comment that said he deserved state violence and a kangaroo court trial over this lol. Feels like we've moved onto a totally different, equally needless discussion while pulling focus away from what really matters
Yeah it was the only public forum/town square of the internet. It just really isn't that anymore, and I think it really matters that people stop using Xitter. It's bad for users and bad for society. That said, you're right, it certainly isn't the highest contradiction and people don't deserve to be brutalized by pigs because they're a shitposter.
But its wack to compare leaving Xitter to leaving the US or giving up cellphones. That was my original point.
Agreed, comparisons to paying taxes or giving up phones or whatnot is pretty silly haha
Okay, tell me why it is silly (while taking into account what I already said in this thread to explain the irrelevance here of rating ease of quitting things).
I can give you a pretty direct example. I remember one of the mutuals I had when I used to use twitter, they sometimes used it to ask for help with stuff, similar to how some people ask for help in mutualaid here. Twitter pre-Musk was a big part of what helped move me left politically and got me exposed to political education. When it was bent toward "mask on fascism" pre-Musk, nobody cared in the kind of way presented in this thread, like there was something wrong with you for using it. Now that the mask is off, suddenly people are terrible for being on there. It's weird.
I can't vouch for it having much to offer at this point. I haven't used it in a while and last I knew, a lot had deteriorated in being overrun by zionist bots, or just like, porn bots. But I know that even post-Musk, there were times people furthered connections and like I mentioned first, got help in one way or another.
Edit: Also, if you've never used it and evidently know very little about it in practice, maybe you shouldn't be crusading about who should or shouldn't use it?
You're talking about how it was useful before, but does it still apply? Seems like that was stomped out.
As for why it's different now, nobody cared because it was a space shared by fascists and antifascists. I never really used it, but was still peripherally aware enough to know that there was a left-Twitter. Similar to Reddit, the site was shared by some of the worst and best people on the internet. That's no longer the case. It's not the internet town square where users share equal space and compete for attention, it's now just a platform for Nazis and pedos by Nazis and pedos. I don't see good reasons to use it. It's a nasty habit.
Grok is stripping clothes off of children's photos and making revenge porn. It's indefensible. People need to log off.
Even though anti imperialist, anti zionist and communist accounts get banned with a higher frequency, it still applies. You may have not noticed but plenty of information that I and other comrades have shared in Lemmygrad comes from Xitter. Example:
Venezuelan news channel post awesome video of a rock band smashing a Trump Piñata -> https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10493257
Pro DPRK account posts films from NK(they also post regular news like new homes being built and way more) -> https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10492303
Who is Ursula Von Der Leyen post comes from Xitter too -> https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10451842
There is just too many examples but maybe you weren't aware because people already extract the good content from there and share it to comrades here.
Based on what? Vibes? You already admitted you have no experience with it.
To be clear, people who use Xitter don't deserve to get beaten by cops. I don't know what the fuck that other user is on about, it's just a nasty habit. But it is a lot easier to give it up than to move out of the US or to stop using a cell phone, and we should talk about that. It's not useful, it's actively harmful to its users, and people who use it should be encouraged to stop.
I misread your comments then. Yeah, it's the other user who actually pissed me off, not you. Sorry for attacking you like that.
Attack ideas but not people. Please check rule 3 so that it could help you understand what is a productive response-> https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10105758
Maybe you should tell this to the brat, Bronstein_Tardigrade. Personally, I will attack whoever I want whenever I deem it necessary.
I understand you and tbh I also disagree with Bronstein_Tardigrade. However, it is better to keep this thread productive and help us by articulating your disagreement with arguments instead of defaulting to insults. Insults only derail this conversation into an unproductive and unhelpful conversation.
With your help, we can keep this thread productive for everyone. Take care.